By Dustin Cabeal

I will say that The Wild Storm makes me painfully aware of my ignorance of the characters. For instance, I have no idea who the woman on the cover is, but I want to be her best friend. She can walk through TV people! How fucking cool is that!?! Seriously though we begin with her walking through screens, all connecting and relating like instant teleportation and at the end its revealed that she’s keeping tabs secretly on the three different groups that were introduced to us thus far and if you pay close attention… some other cool shit.

There is a very fluid motion to her movement. It's cinematic in a way, but also the “gutter” principle wonderfully in that it doesn’t feel like jump cuts, but rather a very clever use of her powerset. In particular, her first reveal in which she looks out from the monitor after another character turns around was the perfect way for the scene to play out. My favorite though was how she got back to her apartment.

The rest of the issue is spent dealing with Angie and the two teams converging on her whereabouts. Marlowe’s team gets their first, and we get to see Grifter suit up… it gave me a boner; I’m not going to hide it. I know… it’s all awkward on this review now, isn’t it? At any rate, it’s a great sequence and so much happens that I don’t even want to talk about it. It was the best possible way for it to go down and a familiar WildStorm term was used which made me giggle. Give me a boner and make me giggle and I’ll put out on a third issue by the way.

Ellis’ writing is just so damn smooth. He’s not trying to clusterfuck everything into each issue, but rather just slowly build up this universe again. It’s a fantastic way to do things, but dammit I wish there was more. It has made me miss the old WildStorm universe and curse previous DC editorial for its mishandling that eventually lead to it being dissolved. With Ellis at the helm, I hope this continues for a long time because comics and comic fans have been missing it.

Another thing that Ellis’ writing is doing quite well is blurring the line of good and bad, black and white. Everything is grey right now; I haven’t a clue who is on the right side of things and really, I don’t care. I can see it from all sides, and that’s due to Ellis’ writing. His sequence of dialogue detailing how Angie got started with I.O. was simple, effective and exposed the “company” and her insecurities on the job.

Grifter is the shit as the art by Jon Davis-Hunt’s artwork shows us. He shoots fucking flashbangs back at the people that threw them! If I don’t see like twenty Grifters at the next con, I’m going to be pissed at you people. Anyway, the art continues to be brilliant. I know that Davis-Hunt is pouring everything he has into this series and it shows. There’s a lot of love in these pages, but also Davis-Hunt is capturing the look and feel of almost every other Ellis WildStorm title. That alone is an amazing feat because that’s something I thought we had kissed goodbye when DC closed the imprint.

There are so many fine details in the art that if you don’t take the time to stare at it really, you’ll miss them. Hell, you’ll probably miss some anyway. There’s a scene with a dude sitting down that actually looks like a dude sitting down. His not flabby gut is sticking out just a little, and the rest of his shape comes from the natural way a t-shirt hangs off the body while sitting. Most artists would just draw a shirt hugging the body. Hell, they would just draw a body and turn it into a shirt, but Davis-Hunt is going for as much realism as possible. Also, he draws people blowing up real good. I thought I was looking at Gears of War for a second.

It’s quite possible that I won’t review the next issue. I feel as if I’m struggling to say any more about this series and it probably doesn’t need my praise. It deserves it for sure as it is, as I said in my Deathstroke review, an extremely close second for being the best DC title published at the moment. I haven’t looked at the sales, but if it’s not one of their top titles then there’s something very wrong with the readers of comics because this shit is golden and only getting better… which I think is platinum. The Wild Storm is platinum.